On September 14th, 2017, we published revised versions of our Privacy Policy, Terms of Service and Website Use Policy and published a Cookie Policy. Your continued use of Lynda.com means you agree to these revised documents, so please take a few minutes to read and understand them.

Windows 8: Management

Author

Released

Learn how to assist users, recover data, monitor performance, and start up safely in Windows 8. In this course, author Steve Fullmer covers how to perform these management tasks and many others, with a host of Windows 8 management tools, including advanced recovery options, recovery command-line tools, advanced start-up options, secure boot, Windows To Go, Hyper-V, and ReadyBoost.

Skill Level Advanced

2h 3m

Duration

7,897

Views

Show MoreShow Less

- Windows 7 and Windows 8 are very similar, and certainlythe desktop and the infrastructure of Windows 8is much like Windows 7.If we take a look at the desktop here, the navigationis very similar, this is Windows 8.1, so they haveto some degree replaced the Start menu, or theStart pearl, but there are some very unique featuresin Windows 8.So rather than reteaching everything about Windows 7,this course, these modules, are about managingWindows 8, and specifically focus on the new featuresand functionality of Windows 8, including significantupgrades to some of the Windows 7 infrastructureand architecture features.

We're going to talk about some of the new recoverycapabilities and some of the alternatives,some of which are mutually exclusive in Windows 8.We're going to talk about some of the new boot elementsand boot features available to us in Windows 8as well as additional or enhanced performance tools.We talk about recovery, we'll talk about the new tool,File History, which replaces Windows 7 andWindows 8 File Backup and Recovery.You get one or the other, File History or theWindows 7 Backup and Recovery Tool available to you.When you turn on File History in Windows 7,File Backup and Recovery is not available.

So you have some decisions to make as you move intoWindows 8, you want to watch some of these videosand learn that content.We have the new capability to do storage spaces,using multiple disk drives to provide yourselfadditional storage capability, with the enhancedcapabilities of Windows 8.You need to be aware of how storage spaces worksbecause you do not want to pre-format or pre-partitiondrives using something like Disk Manager, you needuntouched drives or drives that have not beenpartitioned and formatted, in order to set upstorage spaces.

So you're going to need to watch that if you're going touse multiple drives or large storage arrays in Windows 8.We have advanced startup capabilities to us in terms ofhow our systems start.Clearly we have a different Start screen,a different boot sequence, although we have theRE environment and the operating system partitioned,you want to understand what those features are,we talk about advanced startup.We also talk about advanced recovery.Now, in our series where we talk about advanced recovery,there's a number of tools that will allow us toauto-refresh or restore our system.

So if we look at the essentially Start Settings herein PC Settings, and we go down here backfrom Accounts to Update and Recovery, we havea number of automated recovery options available to ususing some of the Windows image and othercapabilities that were present only through external meansin Windows 7.They're now automatic with graphic interfacesin Windows 8, we want to become familiar with those.(coughs) Excuse me.Boot elements, we're gonna talk about secure boot.What does secure boot mean?Well, part of that is BIOS or motherboard enabled,how does it operate in Windows 8, how do we configure it?You have the ability with user account controlto only run signed applications in elevated mode.

We automatically require digital signatures for thedrivers in Windows 8, but you have the ability to identifyand only run applications that have been digitally signed.That's how part of the Microsoft Store controlssigned applications, you can set it up so that you canuse this to prevent users from installing or usingthird-party applications.Windows to Go, a new capability of Windows 8 says thatI can have an entire external drive to boot me, not onlyinto the PE or RE environment, but literally have a fullportable copy of Windows 8 on a USB driveor jump drive that I can use to be able to boot my system.

Some great capability there and functionality,that suggests, if you're out in the field repairing systems,Windows 7, Windows 8 or otherwise, or you're going toallow a standard user in your environment to bring intheir own device to work, you can enforce it such thatthey have to boot from an external drive thatruns Windows 8 configured for your enterprise environment.Lots of functionality with this new feature,Windows to Go.Talking about the Hyper-V client.We no longer have XP mode, Windows Virtual PCor Microsoft virtual capabilitieson our Windows 8 box unless we go to use Hyper-V clientthat has very specific hardware requirementsincluding SLAT-enabled processors.

So these are new features in the boot elementsof Windows 8, and this of course helps you becomefamiliar with those.We have standard performance tools that were available to usin Windows 7, they're also available to usin Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.Task Manager, Performance Monitor, Resource Monitor.The Task Manager in particular is very different.If we take a look at the Task Manager in Windows 8.When we bring it up, all we see is Running Applicationsand we have to click More Options or More Detailsand it's quite different because, as opposed tothe processes we were looking before, we now groupelements together in terms of process groups.

We have additional performance capability because ofStore and others, we have Application History thatlets us take a look at which applications aremost using our hardware or memory resources.Startup has been moved from the MS Config fileinto the Task Manager, and more.So Task Manager and other performance tools havebeen dramatically changed in Windows 8.This performance tools module gives youan overview and an introduction to some of those toolsand finally, ReadyBoost capability that waspresent for us, essentially to provide the relocationof our page file for faster boot using solid state drives,still supported in Windows 8 and 8.1, and they willshow you how to configure and use that in yourWindows 8.1 platform in this series.

And so there's our overview pretty much of what'sin this module set, again talking about recovery,boot elements and performance, in particular the newinterfaces and tools available to us in Windows 8and 8.1.